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GermanyXItaly1000

Making a Visual Novel - From Scratch?

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After spending a few weeks browsing dating sims and playing DRAMAtical Murder (don't ask), a friend who's working on an RMXP project with me decided he wanted to try something new. By "something new", he means that he wants to leave RPG Maker and traverse the daunting lands of visual novel-making.

 

He wants to attempt making it from scratch.

Somehow, he's gotten me in on his attempt to make a visual novel.

 

We've got the concept. We've got the script. We've even outlined all the characters and their backstory, minor details, etc.

 

And now all we need is the how.

 

Screwing around with a few visual novel engines in the past, I've learnt the basic functions of ready-made programs like Ren'py and Novelty. They're not extremely capable, but they've got every fundamental factor of a visual novel.

 

My friend is looking for something he can mess around with freely. I can only assume that he means that he wants something that allows him to make everything from scratch and be able to control each aspect of the game to his liking. Graphics, movement, music, timing, etc. He wants it all perfect.

 

Since I have no idea about visual novels, I figure it requires programming knowledge, or some incredible clandestine knowledge that developers like Team GrisGris or Nitro+Chiral seem to possess.

 

But I'm not sure about it at all.

 

What we're looking to make is something along the lines of DRAMAtical Murder. Definitely not in the same genre, but with the same level of functionality.

 

I figured it would be very possible to make something like that in RMXP, but then again he wants to leave RMXP. Maybe Unity would have some good features we can exploit.

 

What does it take to make something like DRAMAtical Murder? Corpse Party is also a pretty prime example, but it doesn't feature much of what the first does.

 

Would making a visual novel from scratch be as good as one made in Flash, or Unity, or whatever people use to make highly function VNs?

 

What does making a visual novel from scratch entail?

 

Otherwise, what program would give us that similar functionality and what does the program require?

 

Any help is highly appreciated!

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I'd just use RPG maker for Visual Novel-Style games. The basic engine has "Show Picture", play BGM/sound effects. If you know C++ Programming, you can write your own program. It can't be THAT hard to have Pictures show up on the screen. For expressions, you need at least eight per character. Here's Atelier Totori for some examples of emotions. Though, she's kind of a Mary Sue with a wooden personality.

 

totori03.jpg

Edited by Jesse66126

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there are a lot of programs you could use to make it, Not sure which would be best tho I never really made a visual novel. Most programs should be fairly easy to get everything you want or as Jesse said you could always make your own in C++ or Ruby, since you're not using anything complicated they shouldn't be too hard.

 

Or also like he said you could use RM, it has all the features you're asking for and also has save/load feature that might be useful.

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Since we're going to stay away from RPG Maker this time (it's going to be a pain :P the engine is beyond useful), let's say we take the route of using C++.

 

We'd have to learn the language first, of course. :P Then where to go from there? We're aiming to have at least a decent game plan before we set out to make anything, so if we hit some roadblocks we can at least be prepared to counter them. 

 

I've never even touched the scripts in RMXP (except for noob edits), so this would be a pretty big step.

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